Abstract

The first part of this paper contextualises the restructuring of education and teacher education within the global and national requirements and demands of Capital in the current epoch of global neoliberalism. It argues that World capital has three plans for education. These are firstly a Capitalist Plan for Education (what it requires education to do- produce labour power with the skills and ideologically compliant attitudes to develop a workforce from which surplus value can be extracted). Secondly, there is a Capitalist Plan in Education (how it plans to make `big bucks'/ money/ profits out of education). There is also third plan, the Capitalist Plan for Education Corporations Globally, the plan whereby national governments such as those in the USA, the UK and Australia promote the privatizing, ownership, consultancy and profit-making activities globally and/or regionally in order to maximize profits of national Capital and of locally-based transnational corporations. The second part is an analytical case study of developments in teacher education in England and Wales under both Conservatives (1979-1997) and New Labour (1997-2005) governments. The third part relates this case study to the broader conservatizing of teacher education (symbolically renamed `teacher training’ in England and Wales in the 1990s) to the enforcement of monitored and tested national curricula (whether formal, as in England and Wales, or semi-formal, as in the USA- through textbooks and assessments). Such ideologies and hierarchicalized material conditions for different raced and gendered classes in society is not uncontested. The fourth part of the paper proposes a series of progressive egalitarian policy principles and proposals that constitute an egalitarian manifesto for critical teacher education and critical transformative pedagogy. The paper proposes a series aims, organizing principles, and principles for the organization of critical transformative egalitarian education.